A Research Tool for User Preferences Elicitation with Facial Expressions

We present a research tool for user preference elicitation that collects both explicit user feedback and unobtrusively acquired facial expressions. The concrete implementation is a web-based user interface where the user is presented with two music excerpts. After listening to both, the user provides a pairwise score (i.e. which of the two items is preferred) for each pair of music excerpts. The novelty of the demo is the integration of the unobtrusive acquisition of facial expressions through the webcam. During the listening of the music excerpts, the system extracts features related to the facial expressions of the user several times per second. The interaction runs as a web application, which allows for a large-scale remote acquisition of emotional data. Up to now, such acquisitions were usually done in controlled environments with few subjects, hence being of little use for the recommender systems community.